The purpose of this research is to examine the play Top Girls by Caryl Churchill from a feminist perspective. The plan of the research will be to set forth the general line of action of the play, including the pattern of ideas that emerge in the work, and then to discuss the means by which the ideas are presented, with reference to feminist social critique.
The thematic structure of Top Girls is best understood as a presentation of ideas about the position of women in a man's social, intellectual, political, and economic world and the coping strategies that women employ in order to survive in that world. The playwright's dramatic strategy for presenting these ideas is create two different worlds, one entirely imaginary and the other grounded in mundane domestic realities. The play begins with a scene of pure fantasy, in which commentary about women's experience of the modern world is abstracted from first-person reportage to a contemporary woman of their experience of historical and imaginary worlds. Five women of different centuries, cultures, and milieus join Marlene, a modern woman (and the lead) who has just been named the chief executive of Top Girls' Employment Agency in London. The women from history are a famed Victorian traveler (Isabella Bird), a 13th-century Japanese courtesan (Lady Nijo), and a 9th-century woman who appears to have masqueraded as a man and been elected Pope (Pope Joan). There are also two fictional women, one a holy warrior/crusader figure in a Breughel painting (Dull Gret) and the other Patient Griselda, from the Clerk's Tale in The Canterbury Tales. The introduction to the play characterizes the fictional women as "women imagined by men" (Introduction 656). As the women gather at a restaurant to help Marlene celebrate her promotion, they talk about the life choices they either faced or made in ways that make clear how much what they did was a function of their relationship to the men in their lives or ...